Angels among us

This season, I've often felt close to tears.  I cannot get over the sheer amount of loss and sadness I've seen around me.  At the same time, I love to know that angels are all around.  I know my personal angels, the spirits of my babies who have passed, have been present for and with us.  Not just that, but I've seen human angels all around, reaching out to those who are suffering.  We as a family find opportunities to serve and then record what we do.  We put little slips, stating the things we do for people, in a jar.  It's our gift to our angels and the last present we open Christmas morning, so we can read them together.  It's the perfect time to have and be an angel.  It doesn't stop the hurt inside, but sharing and reaching out to others sure does help.

A song for the season

I have heard of at least three local stories of women losing their babies in the last 24 hours.  Their Christmas season will ever more be colored by trauma and loss. One would like to think of this as a season of joy, love and laughter, but there are so many ghosts of Christmas past haunting many of us that it's sometimes hard to feel the joy or want to laugh.  Sometimes, it's even hard to care.  My husband's mother was the spirit of Christmas for him, yet she died a week before the holiday.  Every Christmas since has been dimmed by this loss, and that was 20 years ago or more.  And the loss doesn't have to occur during the season to cast a shadow on every holiday for years to come.  I mentioned this holiday issue in my last blog.

For the first four years after Allie's loss, I felt a compulsion to reach out to people, to find as many people as possible I could serve and for whom I could buy Christmas gifts.  I wanted to help people have a better holiday, but almost more, I wanted to survive the holiday season without my baby, with a silence where there should be laughter of my third child.  And it helped.  It carried me through to New Years.  And for Christmas every year for the rest of my life, I will fill a jar for my angels as their gift from me, a jar with all the service we as a family have done throughout the holidays and the year.  We read each slip on Christmas in place of a little five-year-old and her younger siblings opening dolls or bears  It makes for a meaningful climax after the present unwrapping is done.

I still reach out and help, but it's more for others now.  I no longer cry as much when I hear songs about angels and babies, though occasionally, tears still come.  I still identify most with Christmas songs about the experience of motherhood, like "Mary Did You Know," Amy Grant's "Breath of Heaven," and "What Child Is This?"  I also like "Christmas Shoes" because it starts to reach the sadness and joy of the season.  Even though I've heard them multiple times, I often cry mourning or healing tears on hearing them.

I found a fairly new song yesterday that makes me cry just to think about it.  I can't mention its name without crying, but it's a good kind of tears, healing tears.  The song moved me in a way most Christmas songs don't.  And I don't even generally listen to country.  It's called "Broken Hearts like Mine" by Cherie Call.  It hits on the pain of the season for those in mourning, but also on the healing nature of the reason for the season.  I thought I'd share it with those out there who may experience the holiday through a similar lens of mourning.  The song is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pGNFXCq2pY  I know we all can find healing through Him.  That was part of the purpose for his atonement and resurrection, was to understand our pain and help us heal.  We just need to reach out, and he will be there for all of us.  I wish everyone, in spite of the pain, a joyous or at least peaceful season.

Happy Thanksgiving?

Holidays are always the hardest.  I can endure by forgetting most of the time.  I survive by keeping busy.  I made it okay through the death of another cat, my kittens' mama I'd taken under my wing.  I make it through days that are dull or hard or exhausting.  I can smile.  I can laugh.  I can focus on this moment.  Then a holiday comes along.  And the fineness, the smile, the ability to feel like I'm becoming whole again goes away.  And I'm left missing her again.  I'm left facing another important day without her here, at least so I can see her.  She would have been five and a half, old enough to love the pie and the turkey and hate the green beans and laugh and play with her cousins.  And that empty hole that used to have my Alamanda in it feels so empty, so lonely, so lost.  I will smile tomorrow.  But tonight, this blog sums it up for me: Sad blog.

The Rainbow Fades

So far, I've mostly written blogs about the early days of loss.  If you'll pardon me for stepping out of my pattern, I'd like to fast forward to today.  I lost another baby this week, a very early pregnancy.  This is always a hard thing, but this one is particularly hard.  Almost everyone who loses a baby looks forward to their rainbow, the baby born after the loss.  This week, after 13 early pregnancies, the latest at ten weeks and the earliest at just over four, I'm finally facing the apparent fact that my body will not carry another baby.  I'll go into some detail at a later date on individual miscarriages.

But for now, I'm just processing the thought that I will not get a rainbow.  It's not a pretty thought, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it.  Some suggest artificial insemination.  What good would that do if my body just won't carry them for whatever reason?  Some might suggest adoption.  I'll get to that in a later blog post, why that is not likely to happen aside from the expense and our age.  I'm nearly forty.  My husband is nearly 50.  It doesn't even make any sense that we have been trying like we have.  But we just felt like there was another one waiting.  Now we see that it is not to be.  My body just will not do it.  I've done the testing, and the doctors come out without any answers for me.  I tried some pills I was given to try to keep my next pregnancy, but they did not help.  

In the beginning, all I wanted was a warm body to fill my empty, cold arms.  I don't think I could have then survived the thought that my arms would remain empty of another baby.  Now, I know I will survive.  It's been a long journey.  I will focus on my gratitude that I have a wonderful husband and two beautiful children I can still hold.  That won't make repeat loss any easier nor the fading rainbow in my imagination any less sad.  It still hurts.  Sometimes, it hurts so badly I still cry like my heart is bursting.  I dread the day very soon when I will let my baby clothes and toys I've held onto for all these years go.  

But I know that there will come a day when I can hold my babies.  I will live for that day, the Second Coming, when I can fill my arms with them again or for the first time, and that reunion will be forever.  And it will be very sweet.  

my Eclipse

The Mother's day before we lost Alamanda, I got a voice mail that told me my brother was dead.   He'd been my best friend all through my childhood, youth, and early adulthood.  But for a couple of years before he passed, we hadn't been talking to each other.  It is a long, ugly story.  But then, without warning, he was gone entirely.  He had been gone for a while from my life, really, uninterested in contact.  But the news shocked me, really sent me into shock.  Until that point, I hadn't lost anyone closer to me than a beloved pet, all of my grandparents, who were ailing and not particularly close to me when they passed, and an uncle I didn't see much.  These were all significant losses, and I don't mean to diminish anyone's experience who goes through these pains.  But I'd never lost anyone truly close until I lost Brent.  It hurt that we had lost the closeness we had once shared.

The news of my brother's death had not truly sunk in when just over a month later, I called home after work to find out my baby was not breathing and had been rushed to the hospital.  To lose loved ones with whom I had little contact was hard, at times devastating.  The losses of some of my favorite pets had left me reeling.  But the pain of all of these losses before did not prepare me for the loss of my baby, the center of my existence.  My older children and husband were and are incredibly important to me.  But anyone who has been a mother to a small infant knows that your world revolves around that infant.  You wake [several times a night] for that baby.  Your first thought in the morning is to tend to the baby.  Half of your brain is always occupied on taking care of that baby.  Your body, especially if you're breast feeding, is keenly aware of his or her existence and the baby's needs at all times.  To have that closeness ripped away is beyond a physical agony.  In fact, I'd rather undergo physical torture than the loss of a child.

I can't speak for all parents.  But I can speak to my experience.  There is nothing worse than the loss of a child.  Nothing.  Here is another poem written a month after the first.  The pain had become slightly but only slightly less acute.  But in my experience, there's no such thing as getting over such a loss.  Only getting through and surviving it.

"A month has passed"

A month has passed

Since I held you in my arms.

Already, the image of your large,

Blue, curious eyes peering at me

Around the breast,

Already the sense of your round warmth

Is fading from my memory

Until you are only a series of pictures

And an aching, sometimes gushing, heart

And a spirit watching me, cheering me on.

The memory of what was

Hides behind the present,

But in quiet moments,

The agony revisits with a twisting sword.

Words cannot convey the pain of your departure.

I strain for the sound of your name

On anyone’s lips but my own.

Your warmth and the glow of your smile,

The happy giggle at my silly face

Seem like a pleasant dream,

The image from my mind

Rather than a reality from my past.

I miss you more than words can say

Even as I wonder how it can be

You were ever part of my life.

Come back.

I've come a long way from when I wrote these poems and early entries.  But I know I have a lot farther to go.  Which is one reason I'm writing these blogs.  Because of so much loss piled on loss, I don't know that I can claim I've really processed or healed from my brother's death.  Often, it hardly seems real, like he just hasn't gotten around to writing recently.  Maybe I'm still in shock from both of these losses.   I struggle to find a meaning for the word "healing" when it comes to loss, at least a meaning I like.  I guess that's because, for everyone, it means something different .  

How to begin?

I found a draft from the post I made for this blog, one I never published from five years ago.  I explain what happened in the next post.

A week ago today, our four month old baby girl, Alamanda, died. I left her on the bed, seemingly far enough from the edge that there shouldn't have been a problem, and buffered from the edge by a firm pillow, then I went to work. She somehow found a way to get off the bed face first into a pillow and smothered. My husband was home and found her. He called 911 and performed CPR, but it was too late. My husband, my children, and myself are all devastated but trying to find a way to pick up the shreds of our lives and move forward.

It's hard to describe the emotional roller coaster we've been through over the last week. Everything from exquisite agony to the peace of knowing without a doubt that we will one day hold our little girl again. This blog will reflect not just my experiences but those of my husband in this impossibly difficult situation. So many others have been through this kind of pain, the loss of a child, before, but everyone's experience is different, and this is our pain. This journey is uniquely ours, but will hopefully help someone else along the way.

We are LDS, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We believe in forever families. But that doesn't always make things easy.

Today, at the week's anniversary, I marked the hours. I checked my clock and marked the hour when a week ago I was feeding her as I held her close, safe and warm in my arms. I marked again when, a week ago, I went to work, something I don't do often and won't do again for a while. I marked again when, a week ago, my husband walked in to check on her, and she was fine. Then again when he walked in and found his world had shattered around him. Then again when I called after work, and my life shattered around me as I rushed to the hospital.

The scenes are all a blur in my mind, doctors coming in to tell me they were doing everything to revive her, the doctor who came in to tell me there was nothing they could do. Then a flurry of counselors, police detectives and CPS workers whose job it is, as a matter of course, to investigate a child's death. It still feels like a nightmare in my mind. People embraced me; members of my church came to support me; my husband came to hold me up. But everything people said to me felt useless next to the aching knowlege that my baby was gone. My husband and I got to hold her lifeless body tight one last time, to kiss her face. But the pain was greater than any we have ever known.

I wrote a poem after that day:

Pain
Blinding, numbing
Burning like a volcano
And clouding out everything
From my vision.
Everything tastes like dirt or salt.
I choke it down to fill the emptiness
But the real emptiness remains.
Everything I see, touch, think about
Links back to chubby toes,
Chunky little legs
Soft little cheeks,
Bright blue eyes
Staring at me from around the breast,
Peach fuzz across the soft head,
Round little bum
Aimed at me for a change
Preparatory to eating.
Where are you, my angel?
I long for you.
My every thought is for you,
Wondering how yesterday could have gone
If I’d have been just a little more careful
With your fragility.
My only comforts,
Your older brother and sister,
Your daddy
And above all knowing one day
You will fill my arms again.

There is more, so much more. The last week has felt more like five years, and my baby sometimes like a fond dream rather than a sweet reality. But for now, this is all I can write.

Tami

5 years later

My name is Tamara Copley.  I started my blog, or rather set up for my blog, five years ago just after my sweet baby died at four months.  She was the center of my world, aside from my older two children and my husband, and suddenly, she was gone.  I was left with a gaping chasm where my baby was supposed to be.

I thought blogging would help, but then I ran into a naysayer, a person I will get into in the not so distant future, who did not want my words out there nor did she care at all about whether or not I healed.  She told me for selfish and damaging reasons that a blog when you're newly mourning was a bad idea.  It would not have been the bad idea she said it would be because sharing is a good way to get through it.  I know that now.  But at the time, I was in so much pain that I could not bear any more and heeded her bad advice.   So now, so far down the road, I have to recreate my initial responses.  Fortunately, I'm a writer, so I wrote anyway, just for me.  And I'm very religious, from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day saints.  The Lord has helped me heal a great deal.  But I wonder how much more I could have healed had I gone ahead and reached out for more support.

I will share some of my early writings, many of them poems that speak more of pain than of particular genius.  This was the talk I shared at the funeral.  The day is as foggy and pain-ridden in my memory as the rest of those days right after she rolled into a pillow and suffocated.  Mostly, I remember wondering how I was going to survive and how it was possible that the words, "baby" and "coffin" could possibly fit in the same sentence.  Here is initial response, as I told it then, with square brackets to show clarifications and changes:

                                                                       ***

Alamanda Marie Copley, our little Alli, was our miracle child.  When we decided it was time to bring in a new baby, Heavenly Father knew we needed time.  [My 3-year-old girl] needed time to call herself my baby.  [My boy] needed time to absorb all the knowledge Mommy had to give.  So [the Lord] held off lending her to us until we were ready, eleven months later.  She started to come, then in a moment, she had decided she was not yet ready, and she stayed with her Father for a short time more.  We miscarried [for the first time].  But Heaven offered comfort in the form of multiple [priesthood] blessings [and the Spirit].  Then, finally, we found out she was really coming, were told in a blessing she would be returning to us, the same glorious, special angel.  But it wasn’t easy.  Heavenly Father decided I could handle the challenge of knowing I have an antibody that [w]ould treat every baby in my body like a disease instead of like the precious [souls] they are.  But He also offered miraculous protection from that antibody, so even the doctors that tended my pregnancy so carefully to ensure my blood didn’t attack hers marveled she wasn’t made anemic or even affected.  Every other week, we went down to McKay Dee in Ogden for ultra sounds.  We’ll have to do the same with every other baby heaven sends our way.
 And like a miracle, [Alli] came three weeks early but perfect.  After the jaundice, she had no other problems.  She was so beautiful, with eye color like that of daddy’s and shape like mommy’s, perfect flawless skin so soft to the touch and all the right number of toes and fingers.  She was tiny, 5 lb 13 oz, but so healthy. 

 Her blessing stated that she was special, that she was close to the Lord.  Daddy got the impression she would be our spiritual giant, our "heavenly chieftain" like her name implies.  She was an enthusiastic eater who wanted to spend every waking minute with Mommy because unlike myself, she knew her time here was short.  Daddy thinks she was always asking her endless visitors from the other side of the veil, the family who had passed on and probably even Jesus, if her time here was done. The first few months--especially months two and three when colic set in--were tough. That last month, she proved] the wait was worth it because she had a ready smile and even many giggles for all of us.  She loved to play with her brother and sister even though she didn’t understand the games, loved to watch as life went by. I’m so thankful Heaven trusted us with four months with this special one.

 Then last Tuesday, her calling here ended, and Heavenly Father took her home.  She was so perfect, she only needed a body to be complete.  It’s been such an ordeal, so hard losing her, missing her.  But she visited us and told us she was okay, that she loves us.  She’s probably been at our home regularly, worrying for Mommy and Daddy and sad she couldn’t hold us and tell us she would return as soon as she can.  We’re taking this as a wake up call, time to change our lives, time to work to be worthy and strive for the day we will be an eternal family and Alli will not leave us again.  She’s our little celestial being, our personal angel watching over us.  A friend of mine suggested we pray Heavenly father and his angels will hug her where we can’t, and Heavenly Father promised us we can always pray to know how she is.
 Alli, I miss you, my sweet one.  I know you’re here today.  We will live our lives so you don’t have to walk alone into the eternities.  We love you so much and we will look forward to seeing you again. 

                                                                      ***
                                                         
That was my talk.  I see many things I left out because it was a public forum.  I left out the agony.  When people said, "How are you?" I knew no one wanted to hear, "I'm dying inside."  There are not words to describe the experience of losing a child.  But if you bear with me, I will piece together my mourning, the suffering surrounding her death above and beyond just the mourning itself, and what has happened since.  This will end up, for a while anyway, being more or less a retroactive blog.  Above all, keep in mind that no one should be able to tell you how to mourn.  If you need to write, write.  If you need to keep busy, do it.  If you need to reach out, there are always people there to grab your hand and help you through.  Until next time.